The Power of Nature
Gaea is what the ancient Greeks called the Earth. Mother. A bringer of life and fertility. A nurturer and a powerful entity. Perhaps we have in our great zeal for conquest of all things intelligent, foregone the most basic understanding of life. That nothing is forever, that no one is immortal and that our existence is dependent on nature and the balance she has brought over the years. Today we are able to live because of the balance of all the elements working together in an ecosystem that is fundamental to our survival. We cannot live without oxygen. We cannot live with excessive heat. We cannot thrive in extreme cold. And we cannot exist on any other known planet.
I remember seeing the Milky way in the Atacama desert and seeing the Southern Cross in real life. It made me realise how small and insignificant we are. And that we are all just passing travellers on an endless scape of time and space that has no known beginning and no foreseeable end.
Perhaps this is why nature is so powerful and such a great teacher. When we have all withdrawn from the smartphones we are glued to and the updates we can’t do without. When it all fades away and passes. We have but what we see, what we feel and what we know which is limited yet far more impactful than any knowledge we could ever glean from some app.
Perhaps each time we feel this need to conquer, we should remind ourselves that the conquest is more within than it ever could be without. As humans, on a tiny planet with amazing resources and spurts of life it has nurtured in phases over billions of years, we need to remember that the world out there is infinite, yet our lives, finite. Hence we must conquer that which we must and that which we need to and that anything beyond would be meat for a piece of fantasy fiction in another realm. It’s fine to dream but it’s important to remember what those dreams need to achieve in the greater scheme of things. For no fool is greater than one who believes he has conquered all.
May we each day remember why our ancestors worshipped the stars, the waterways, the trees and the animals. For Homo sapiens sapiens, although intelligent beyond its own kind, is still but a cog in the great wheel of life, of fortune and of time. And so our time on this Earth is not forever.
When we speak of the end, we must remember that we speak of the end of man. Of humankind. For like the dinosaurs before us, the trilobytes, the Megalodons and insects galore, we too will have the day when we are no more and the Earth, in all her glory will continue on as she has for billions of years through phases and through lessons her inhabitants have often failed to learn.
Gaea will live on.
